Mythopoetic mecha game Dragon Reactor gives me everything I want and I want more

I had already read through the digital version of Dragon Reactor three times when I realized that my physical copy was in my mailbox. I eagerly cut open the envelope and the slim, 60-page, black-and-white zine fell into my hot little hand. I pawed through it, rereading it again, and came away just as delighted as I had been the first time I read it. 

Dragon Reactor is a short, narrative-forward tabletop roleplaying game with a game master, called The Poet, who leads an elite squad of Pilots through a cruel and endless war. Each Pilot is paired with a god-mechs, called Dragons, that are weapons containing powers that are not fully understood until the sky breaks on their war-cries. 

The game was written by Nevyn Holmes and S. Quinn Morris. (Holmes is one half of Dinoberry Press; Julie-Anne “Jam” Muñoz, the other half of the press, worked on demo layout and additional assets). Gameplay takes place over a 2-3 hour session, which has three discrete phases: Conflict, Aftermath, and Countdown. It’s intended for longer campaign play but is well formatted for a single one-shot session, with short playbooks called “Archetypes.” It feels mechanically similar to the Best Left Buried system used in a lot of Soulmuppet game design (Orbital Blues is the one I’m most familiar with), and works with a series of D6 dice pools that vary depending on what stage of the Conflict you’re in. Most importantly, however, Dragon Reactor utilizes Apocalypse World-inspired clocks throughout the game, both as personal countdowns and for the larger, over-arching Doom clock.   

More than its design inspirations, Dragon Reactor wears its narrative and genre inspirations on its sleeve and never once apologizes for it. It doesn’t back down; it doesn’t give you a chance to insert another narrative. This is war and you are a killer. It doesn’t matter what you want or what you dreamed of, you are in a never-ending conflict and you have a gun-shaped machine that wants you to use it, that’s begging you, that’s screaming at you to pull the trigger, please. The Dragon is romanticized in the kind of apotheotic language used for machines we idealize and don’t fully understand, but despite that, war is always treated as something uniquely horrifying, and the discordance emulates the feelings of shame, inner turmoil, and emotional dissonance that characters feel as they stomp through the game.

There is no real way to win the endless war in Dragon Reactor. A Doom clock is established at the beginning of the game, creating immediate tension and reminding Pilots that their wartime fuckups have reality-altering consequences. Filling in a Doom clock doesn’t mean the end of the game; it means catastrophe. If you continue playing, you start a new Doom clock, and enter Conflict again. If you identify a way (either through cleverness or compromise) that the characters can end the war, the text tells you to immediately stop the game, agree that this will provide lasting peace or you keep playing to see who fires the next first shot. This isn’t a game about winning and losing. It’s a game about the constancy of loss, and says that once something is gone; dead, destroyed, doomed, it leaves behind an abyssal emptiness, not a salvageable space.

Every part of the game reminds Pilots that doom is a starving thing nipping at their heels; failures are either pathetic or pyrrhic. Success is measured as Proud and Pinnacle. Success is never prosperity; it can only be described as the ability to persist until the next battle. 

Folks expecting tactical resource management or the ability to flex board control strategy should look to games like Lancer and Battletech. Those looking for a looser narrative mecha game might want to check out CHVLR or ECH0 (or really any of the games in the now-famous Emotional Mecha Jam from seven years ago). I think that Girl Frame is the contemporary mecha game that would sit next to it on a shelf, but even then Dragon Reactor is more compact in page count and more expansive in its themes. Like Girl Frame, Dragon Reactor strikes an interesting balance between strategy and narrative; where tactics don’t center around whether or not your mecha is successful in battle, but whether or not something happens that emotionally devastates you. 

Pilots have to remain grounded or else they become tools for the war. They trade bonds with their fellow Pilots, develop Anchors that keep them grounded (and who have their own clocks to demonstrate a good or failing relationship), and develop Rivals. One of my (very few) complaints about the game is that I wish some of this was more emergent in gameplay. Rivals get fleshed out when they appear, which I really like, and as soon as I read those details I wondered why these weren’t a part of other bond-rituals for the Pilot. I think creating these tenuous holds while in the middle of a war, or even flashing back, would compound the horror of the game, rather than providing them as a touchstone or icon to remember. 

Archetype Refrains — described as a pilot’s “torment manifest” — are a particularly unique part of the game. Each character Archetype gets three unique refrains, and throughout the game you can add two more refrains “during intense moments of drama or tension — events that shake the self.” When used, they allow the Pilot to remake a part of the narrative; “they reach far and chaotically into the world” and the desired effect comes to pass, no matter what. For example, the Ace Archetype Refrains are “War is a playground; I am an arrow; I am not just a number.” Rookie Refrains are “War is new and terrifying; I am a warm embrace; I am not to be underestimated.” 

There is a ton of flavor here, a lot of ways to dig into your character’s psyche and come out of it understanding who they are, what they want, and what they’re willing to give up to get it. When faced with war, a Refrain like “I am an arrow” can do a lot of damage. When facing a commanding officer, “I am not just a number” can do just as much damage. The game never loses sight of the fact that war is a decision made a hundred-thousand times, by a hundred-thousand people. 

Refrains represent both a coping mechanism and a weapon. They are presented as a release valve, a catharsis practice that allows you to do what you want when your very soul is shattering, but the game leaves you without any space to internalize healing at any level. If you ever use a non-Archetype refrain you can never use it again. It worked; now it doesn’t. Your tolerance is not any higher, it is just a different texture. You cannot recover from that which you have not yet escaped.

After finishing Dragon Reactor, I wish certain areas were more mechanically defined; where parts of the Pilot or the Dragon could be modified to better suit the game or character. I felt this even more intensely when reading about “Modules” which are “representations of specialized gear, upgrades, and modifications” that can be activated during a Conflict. Much like loadout in Blades in the Dark, these modules are not defined beforehand except as slots on your Dragon’s sheet. Once utilized they change the scope of your Dragon’s capabilities. Modules don’t stick around; they’re one-time use bonuses that a Pilot can discover, activate, or accidentally trip during a single Conflict. They don’t become a part of the Dragon or the character, and they always reset at the end of a Conflict. 

(I will admit that this feels in line with the genre; a character unleashes a remarkable new weapon, only to have your enemy establish a counter-weapon next episode. Your weapon works against an opponent once. You must adapt or you will be overwhelmed. Still! I want a little more crunch here.)

The game doesn’t believe pilots are capable of evolution; you cannot improve, you can only escalate. Your character becomes more and more desperate. Experience is not present; you are Pilots in the cockpit of some of the most dangerous machines in the world, if not the universe. Change is possible, but only so far. These are galaxy-ending Dragons, and they don’t need to improve. They need you to pull the fucking trigger. 

The book itself is emblematic of a small team that knows exactly what they want out of a zine. It’s compact in size and information-dense, fitting neatly alongside spiritual neighbours like Mothership modules. The interior artwork (all drawn by Emma Harvey) is sketchy and dynamic, thick, dramatic inky outlines over thin, shaky pencil lines, which fill in details and add depth to the illustrations. There aren’t many; seven or eight larger pieces and a couple spot illustrations, but what’s there is effective and evocative. This is clearly a book that wants to show you what you can do with it, rather than show off what they were able to do for it. 

The biggest issue I have with Dragon Reactor is that after reading the rulebook, I wanted more. It’s like being given an aperitif and then watching someone else eat a five-course meal. I want more clocks, more rivals, more character options, more setting design. I want adventures, I want factions, I want a map. I want a dozen maps! I don’t usually feel like this; I am usually the kind of gamer (and critic) to ask that things remain contained, focused, within the boundaries of its rules and ambitions. But with Dragon Reactor there is so much unsaid, so much blurry at the edges, so much waiting for the players to render at the table that I am left wanting, like a man dying of thirst in a desert. I want experiences. I want playthroughs. I want to get to see the serpents holding up the tree. I am experiencing the kind of greed God warns of in the Bible. 

But the game doesn’t indulge me. It doesn’t give me excess, but efficient poetry. It knows what it’s doing; it knows what it wants from the players at the table; and it knows how to get you there. It describes itself as “mythopoetic” on the (now-complete) crowdfunding campaign, and it’s clear that mythmaking is central to this game. For example, the Dragons’ stats — called Focuses — are described as freedoms: “The freedom of knowing nothing can catch you.” “The freedom to erase the world.” 

In the Aftermath of the Conflict, Pilots are asked “what is this battle named by those who survived?”

This is the real trick of the game, and the single mechanic that fulfills Dragon Reactor’s mythopoetic promise. It’s a flag planted on the battlefield, a simple, single question with no elaboration, presented without fanfare at the end of a Conflict, when Pilots think they can rest. But it’s this question that gives you the opportunity to rewrite history, to lionize the victors, to vilipend the enemy. You can satirize the political nature of the conflict, martyr a dead Pilot, create a pilgrimage site for those who might worship the Dragon that fell from the sky today. Are you clear-eyed about the battle? Do you carry regrets? Is this the day you decide you would rather die than let this war go on for a single more conflict? Is this The Last Battle or The First Victory? 

When you fight wars, what histories will be written about you? And, more importantly, what does that matter to you, a soldier, who has become a weapon-extension of a war-god that considers you future collateral damage and not important at all? Dragon Reactor wants you to tire of it. It wants you to find an ending, when all you can see, and all that is shown, is Doom.